Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Part of the confusion in discussion about God concerns “having a right to believe” what you want, or people “being entitled to their opinions,” or “being free to believe,” or having religious freedom. It is clear from many things that believers say (usually it is some form of belief in God that is being defended by this route) in these conversations that they believe that these principles of freedom or entitlement are true, and that give us epistemic license with God matters that is unlike what we have in other arenas. You’d immediately find a new one if your doctor said that you have incurable cancer and only 6 weeks to live, and when you asked why she thinks that, she said, “Well, everyone entitled to believe what they want, it’s a free country after all.”

When people makes these comments about religious matters what they seem to be suggesting is that religious freedom is akin to physical freedom or the right to be unrestricted in your activities. You have a legal right to assemble, a right to free speech, a right to free movement and so on. And in all those cases, that moral and legal right preserves your ability to do and say what you want (with a few notable exceptions.) Those rights say nothing about the content of your free speeches and actions. They assure that a whole class of activities be available to you. So with freedom of religion or the legal right to practice and pursue the religious activities of your choice, you are entitled to the same sort of openness.

But having the legal and moral right to say or do a wide range of things should not be confused with having epistemic justification for them. Being free to do it doesn’t remove epistemic accountability or responsibility. Your entitlement to the opportunity to pursue a wide range of activities doesn’t render all of those activities wise, reasonable, correct, or true. You have a right to free speech, and that means you can stand up in a public forum and shout that 2 + 2 = 5, but obviously that doesn’t make it true. Legally and morally you have a right to fall down on your knees and worship the great Juju at the bottom of the river Limpopo. You can burn your house down as a sign of dedication to him, get yourself tattooed from head to foot with images of him (What does the great Juju look like anyway?), or you can go wait on a mountain top for him to come take you to the next realm of existence. But doing all of that would probably be completely silly. Given what you know about the world, such beliefs and activities are clearly irrational, even though you are entitled to espouse them and act accordingly.

Satisfying epistemic standards of justification is a completely different question than the question of rights. Being reasonable, as we saw previously, is a complicated matter. But at the very least, what will render a belief justified is that you have some evidence or some reasons that you take to be sufficiently indicative of the truth of a claim, and that pass some minimum standard of support that we all recognize as acceptable. People can and do ignore the evidence frequently. But it’s a deep confusion to mistake the fact that one can do it for good reasons that one should. You can go to the corner store and spend your entire retirement savings on jelly beans, but being able to do it doesn’t render the act justified. Consider the difference between a murder defendant who tries to excuse her actions by saying that she killed the victim because she had a gun and he was standing there, and the defendant who shot the victim because he had her cornered and was making it clear that he was going to kill her if nothing stopped him. The latter is a good defense, the former is no reason at all.

Let’s distinguish between a right to religious freedom, a right to assembly, and a right to have the religious belief of your choice. Once we look at it closely, it becomes clear that it doesn’t make any sense to say that you have a right to religious beliefs at all. That sort of right is unintelligible, so no such right exists.

First, the right to religious belief is nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the United Nation Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The moral and legal rights we all have are of a different category than belief. Rights impose duties on others. When you possess a right, than creates some obligation on the part of others to provide something to you. In the case of negative rights, they amount to being assured of having the option to pursue a range of activities without encumbrance. No one can act to restrict you, and they fulfill their duty to you simply by not messing with you. Positive rights are entitlements to receive something more substantial from others than inaction—they have to get up off the couch and give you something to fulfill their duty to you. So your right to an education imposes a duty of paying taxes or some kind of response on others to make sure that you get what you have coming to you.

When we say you have a right to believe what you want, what could that mean in terms of duties for others? Is it a negative right such that they must not present any obstacle to your believing? We could oppose your believing something either with our words or with our actions. Does your putative right to believe impose a duty on me not to say something to the contrary when you claim you believe that 2+2=5, or that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, or that God created the world 6,000 years ago? No, clearly not. People can and do believe patently false things. But there are no good reasons for why the rest of us cannot say otherwise, try to talk them out of it, or point out that what they believe is patently false and contrary to the evidence. In fact, one might argue that when somebody has a crazy idea, especially if it is going to contribute to harm to the rest of us, the rest of us have an obligation to speak up. Your so-called right to believe doesn’t mean that I have to nod my head and agree with what you say.

Does your having a right to believe impose some duty on the rest of us to restrict our actions? Does it entitle you to not be harassed, physically coerced, kidnapped and brainwashed, tortured, blackmailed, or otherwise physically forced to say and act like you don’t believe it? The answer here is no too. You do have rights that impose duties on the rest of us to refrain from physically encumbering you, but it’s not your right to believe that imposes those duties on others. The reason I shouldn’t kidnap, harass, torture, or physical coerce you is not that your beliefs might be adversely affected, it’s that your body or your physical well-being would be compromised. Those things would cause you pain and suffering. And pain and suffering are bad in and of themselves, not because they have anything to do with your beliefs. It would be immoral and illegal for me to slowly burn a kitten to death, but the reason that would be wrong has nothing to do with kitty’s beliefs. Cat’s don’t have beliefs, nor do they have religious affiliations.

You have a legal and moral right not to have your physical freedoms encumbered, and that rules out those sorts of abuses. Nowhere in the Constitution, or American legal precedents, or in thoughtful theories of morality, rights, and duties will you find an assurance against physical abuses that is based upon a right to believe. Your right to physical freedom is a basic human right to itself and is not built upon something more fundamental like a right to belief.

We can make sense of rights talk about things like freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, a right to vote, a right to legal representation, a right to be treated as an autonomous moral agent. For all of these rights other people can do things that will impair or prevent you from doing something. You might get physically prevented from voting--and we want to make sure that doesn't happen. You might be prevented from assembling--and we want to make sure you are able to do so. You could be deprived of a fair trial, and so on.

But what could anyone do to make you stop believing something? I can talk to you. I can argue with you. I can try to persuade you that what you believe is mistaken. But there’s nothing morally wrong with any of these. You don’t have a right to not have me criticize your reasoning, although you can walk away and not listen if you choose. If I kidnap you, threaten you, or brainwash you to change your beliefs, then clearly I have violated your rights. But it's not your right to believe whatever you want. It's your basic freedoms to be unencumbered. Arguing with you, making a case against something you believe, or showing you evidence that makes it clear that what you believe is mistaken are not things you have a right to protected from. You do not have a right against my claiming that something is false when you think it is true. I do not have a duty to refrain from speaking my mind when you believe something that is unreasonable. (And the same goes if I am the one being unreasonable.) Nor do you have a right to be protected from anything that might change your mind.

Torture, threats, and physical coercion don’t really seem to change people’s beliefs anyway. When the north Vietnamese tortured American POWs and made them confess their conversion to communism on film, what the POWs did to stop the torture was say the words that their torturers wanted to hear. But often they didn’t really believe them, and everyone watching the taped confessions knew that and didn’t hold the confession against him.

In some even more extreme cases, it might be possible to really change someone’s beliefs, but doing so seems to require a much more radical alteration of everything about them. The Simbianese Liberation Army kidnapped millionaire heiress Patty Hearst. After months of abuse, starvation, rape, and torture she was seen helping them rob a bank in San Francisco. A jury, unsympathetic to her defense that she was brainwashed and forced to collaborate, found her guilty of ban robbery and convicted her to 7 years in prison. This was perhaps the closest to successful attempt ever at changing someone’s belief structure, and it still didn’t work. What they did wrong to her should not be characterized primarily in terms of violating her putative right to belief. And her case makes it clear that we probably couldn’t really change your beliefs by force even if we tried the most extreme measures. So another deep flaw in the notion that people have a right to belief what they want is that there is any way to take one’s beliefs away. How can you have a right to something that can’t, even in the most extreme circumstances can’t be taken away? The POW and Hearst examples make it even clearer how thin and off the mark the “I have a right to believe what I want” response is when someone who disagrees presents contrary words to the view. The response is an ill-frame evasion, nothing more. No such right exists or is even intelligible. And the bogus right to believe certainly can’t be a defense for having no good justification for what you believe is true when you live on my block, vote for presidents, have children, elect school board officials, and a host of other actions that have a direct bearing on the lives of the rest of us.

So I really can't make any sense of the claim that you have a right to believe what you choose. Even if people have the right, that doesn't give anyone the right not to be criticized, corrected, argued with, or refuted by the evidence. And it doesn't give you the right to continue to believe something that is patently false when you know better and all the evidence is against you.

Furthermore, it’s not even clear that other people can do anything to stop you from believing what you want to, even if they tried really hard. I have certainly been in lots of prolonged philosophical debates with people where no argument I could muster and no reasons I could give were adequate to dissuade someone of something that I thought was totally unreasonable. Sometimes I can convince someone, and sometimes they convince me. But I didn’t violate their bogus right to believe by convincing them to change their minds, nor did they do some belief injustice to me by trying or succeeding in getting me to change mine. In fact, I consider it a great benefit to have someone straighten me out—they’ve given me something very valuable that they didn’t have to.

So the right to believe that people keep talking about really doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not a negative right—it imposes no duties of restraint on others that weren’t already covered by your real rights. It’s not a positive right—I don’t have to pay taxes or make some positive contribution to your being able to form beliefs. You’re going to do that, no matter what I do or don’t do. Nothing I could do would make it possible for you to form beliefs whereas you couldn’t before. And nothing I might withhold will make it impossible for you to form beliefs.

What renders a belief reasonable is that a person has good reasons for it. They have done a good job of gathering the evidence, they have considered it carefully, they have reflected on the various ways in which they could be wrong, they have taken alternative views seriously, and they have arrived at an informed view about what the evidence indicates or supports. It doesn’t acquire justification and it is not reasonable simply because you can believe it, or because of some entitlement to religious freedom and tolerance. Our freedoms include lots of things that are positively stupid to do. Having a right to pursue those mistakes doesn’t render them wise, supported by the evidence, or thoughtful.

Another problem with the so-called right to believe is that no one really thinks it’s true. If somebody told you that a principle they live by, one of their fundamental beliefs, is that whites are superior to blacks, or that the Jews ought to be exterminated, you would not accept that they have a right to believe that. We would be scandalized if some claimed that for them it is an article of faith that the Holocaust didn’t happen. If a mother said to the cancer specialist that she has a right to believe that her son doesn’t have leukemia even though all the test results say otherwise we would say she’s unfit. Or imagine if the doctor asserted that he had faith that your child has leukemia. You’d go get another opinion. If a teacher claimed that he has a right to believe that the Earth is flat if he wants to, we’d take our kids out of his class and file a lawsuit. If a car mechanic told you that he just has a feeling that your car needs a $100 repair, but no more specific evidence, you’d find another mechanic. We would invoke more stringent standards of evidence for a mere $100 car repair than we demand from people concerning their most profoundly important religious views.

People can and do believe a lot of things, and many of them are patently and obviously false. Calling it a "belief" and invoking some mysterious right to it doesn't render it true or reasonable or well-supported by the evidence. In fact, you probably think that a person has a duty not to believe something as inflammatory and hurtful as the racial superiority claim or the leukemia diagnosis unless they could show that they have met the highest standards of evidence. So why is it with religious beliefs we have reversed this and the religious believer doesn't have to offer any evidential support whatsoever? We can't simply take it on faith that blacks are inferior, or that women are not as smart as men, or that homosexuals are pedophiles. So why do we give people a free pass when they take it on faith that there is a God and that God told them to do all sorts of things?

6 comments:

(the following is extracted from George Carlin's HBO special, "You Are All Diseased", recorded live at New York City's Beacon Theater on February 6, 1999)

In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

Joe Rogan

Rogan is best known as the host of NBC's Fear Factor and for his role on Newsradio.

A reader supplies some relevant quotes from his website:

"I'm one of those crazy people who believes that all human beings share one consciousness. So if you're mean and evil to someone, you're being evil to yourself. But I also believe in a lot of dumb **** like Bigfoot and UFOs, so it's tough to take me seriously. I just find it a little odd that the same government that denies the existence of UFOs insists on sticking to the "single bullet theory."

"Despite all the advancements in science, and all things about religion that are disproved it still marches on. The bottom line is that the only real, absolutely provable answers about life and our place in the universe are provided by science, and religion has been holding down science since day one."

"I saw a documentary on the brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking, where he said he had a meeting with the pope, and that the pope said to him that it's all right to explore the universe, but told him not to look into the origins of the big bang, for that would be questioning God's story of creation.

Wow.

Just imagine that one of the greatest minds to come along in the last few hundred years, and he�s taking directions from a cult leader that wears big goofy hats.

That, my friends, is offensive."

"Every single religion that has ever been on the face of the Earth, ever, is a cult. That's all they are. Just a cult with millions of people in them. Meanwhile, they have a bunch of really bad ... stories that require more belief than an episode of "I Dream of Jeannie.'

"You're supposed to just go along with it. Meanwhile your brain is just spinning, going, "How is this real?' They will just not listen to logic. To me, that's fascinating that so many people are willing to buy into it. It's be cause people need answers. I'd rather have no answers than a(n) ... answer that makes me an idiot.'"

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I see your point, but could not the theist say: "I don't see gravity, but I feel it", then "I don't see the holy ghost, but I feel it". "My mother has faith that I love her, even if I can't really prove it to her without falling into some trap of egoism". Or something like: "Faith is pragmatic therefore true, if we have no faith, then we go insane from percieving the world too scientifically, or being worried that gravity will fail, and such and so forth. I think the difference however, is that when someone says they feel the holy ghost, they are only feeling their own emotions, unlike feeling gravity. But I may not convince them of the difference.

"So why do we give people a free pass when they take it on faith that there is a God and that God told them to do all sorts of things?"

Because we don't want to hurt people's feelings.

And because we don't want to watch them freak out when we laugh at their magical, unsound thinking.

And all of that relates to culture and history -- we have been raised with the silly notion that we have to respect religious belief.

Why?

Tradition and a respect for tolerance, and in some cases, fear.

The idea of respect for the tradition/history of religion and the good things it has supposedly been responsible for blocks us from completely throwing it in the trash.

This is the Pyne argument: "If religion has been responsible for good things in the past, we should respect and tolerate it -- FOREVER."

But one can easily make the same argument inversely -- If religion has been responsible for bad things in the past...yada yada yada.

This is clearly an invalid line of reasoning -- bad metaphysics so to speak.

It simply doesn't follow that we should respect or tolerate or allow the continued existence of R simply because it did something arguably decent, ONCE.

We also fear theists, I think, in many cases -- we know they are a bit crazy and need the god fix -- to hold things together.

So what is the answer here? I think the need for a "right to believe" will erode as humanity grows up.

Of course we have to hope that the radical christians and muslims don't blow the whole world up first.

But how do we speed the growing up of humanity?

It's largely a political battle of will -- we atheists need to fight against the odds and keep arguing for epistemic responsibility.

We need to call a spade a spade; for example, the right to religious belief is simply a convenient excuse used to allow the defeated-with-facts-theist to walk away with their wounded pride and continue belieiving a child's story.

Dean 192Tell me, who has the right? I chose not to believe and I am branded; find that I am no longer on the list to be invited to social gatherings; and people give me a wide berth. When one make the rational decision not to believe, it is as though you are an alien. I have to wonder why this is so. Considering of course that there is some truth to a church/religious conspiracy to control the masses in hopes of producing what they consider best for humanity. But one could consider that they hope to control the masses for some greater good, or do they hope to control the masses for some other gain—monetary, nation/state, or just because they get off controlling people.

If the theists are so convinced that man has free will, what is so difficult with giving everyone just that—free will not to believe? Is it that we are a threat to them, and if so how? 1) Perhaps we will crush they dreams of the afterlife; 2) or convince the masses that they have fallen prey to the biggest con-job ever. In addition, to think of the significance of a political candidate when he/she has to make a religious statement to be elected can be frightening. Does anyone know when and atheists ran for an office?

In God we trust, how can this be so, when it appears humankind has considered itself the spokesperson for god (Oh shit, bend over and kiss your ass good-by).

Boy that's that a long rant. I only skimmed it. However your title "There is no right to religious Belief" seems to sum it up. I agree. Rights impose on us all. By impose I mean they create an obligation. The right to a trial by jury imposes on us the obligation to serve on juries. Freedom doesn't. There is a freedom to believe as you will but no inherent right assigned by a country. The right and the freedom is built into being human. It can't be stopped even by law or force.

Of course the reverse is true as well. "There is No Right To Atheist Belief". For all the same reasons you detailed. I'm glad you didn't use this for one of your 100 reasons.

"You don't have a right to believe that" doesn't imply "you can't keep me from talking to you," it implies "you are a stupid stupidhead and why don't you agree with me already, argh!" At least, that's the message I got from this essay. :P

Seriously, what the heck are you even trying to say? It sounds like you're saying freedom of speech is the right to inflict abuse on everyone that you think is Wrong on the Internet. And that "if you can't prove it to me, using methodology that I accept, you have no right to your opinion."

I'm trying to think of a response to that which doesn't include profanity, and it has nothing to do with whether the people you think have no right to their beliefs are religious or not.

My book is out:

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Atheism

Author:

Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.